“Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my
books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages,
they are ghosts. I take one down and it
speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of
which it alone possesses knowledge. I
call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than
ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the
dead, not the living, that attend my levees.”
Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
Of all the grand
libraries of history and the world, at the top must be ranked the Bodleian at Oxford University. So it was with great
pleasure that we come to a compendium celebrating the written word published by
that great institution and entitled, The Book Lovers’ Anthology: A Compendium of Writing about Books, Readers & Libraries (Bodleian Library, 2014).
The selections here
mainly draw from the nineteenth century and before, and weigh heavily on the
side of western European writers, but it is well worth the investment to peruse
the gathering of poetry and prose that populate the pages. Could there be a second volume of more modern
stuff, or a gathering of multicultural texts?
There could be a series of books on the subject, and it is fitting that
the Bodleian be given stewardship given its long and storied history.
The institution began
as a set of rooms devoted to a small number of volumes. Sir Thomas Bodley, a scholar, refurbished the
library and began soliciting books from across England. Bodley felt called to do this work and
considered it even more important than his years serving the Commonwealth. The library officially opened in 1602.
At one point, a deal
was struck with the Stationers’ Company of London to place a copy of every book
published in England on the shelves of the Bodleian, and the collection began
to grow exponentially. The Copyright Act
of 1842 solidified the agreement with the Stationers’ Company going forward,
and the staff began soliciting books from around the globe.
The staff and patrons
had to suffer the elements in the cold winters.
No fires were to be kindled in the library for fear of destroying the
collection, so scholars bundled up to use the library and stay warm. There are reports of several freezing to
death over the years until engineers installed a hot water heating system.
In 1909, the first
bookstore, the largest of its kind, was installed in the basement and opened to
the public. The store was the first to
use compact shelving. By 1925, librarian
Sir Arthur Cowley warned that the Bodleian was running out of space. The rooms also lacked light other than what
came in the windows during daylight hours.
Of course, in winter, this limited the library’s hours of operation, so
in 1929, electric lights were installed.
The library also continued to build and add space to house collections,
and the entire enterprise was connected by pneumatic tubes and a mechanical conveyor
to move books and manuscripts around the complex to supply onsite scholars.
The remodeled Bodleian
was reopened in 1946 by King George VI, but in the middle of the ceremony, the
key broke in the lock, and officials had to literally break into the building
to continue the dedication. The broken
key remains on display in the library.
Today, the library
still struggles to accommodate all the books and manuscripts deposited
there. In 2010, a storage facility was
opened in Swindon containing 154 miles of additional shelving to house 8.4
million volumes.
As for The Book Lovers’ Anthology, here are
some of the more interesting in the compendium:
“All books are divisible into two classes,” writes John Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies, “the books of the hour and the books of all
time. Mark this distinction—it is not
one of quality only. It is not merely the
bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hours, and good
ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time.”
Francis Bacon writes
in Apophthegmes that Alonso of Aragon was wont to say, in
commendation of Age, that Age appeared to be best in four things; old wood best
to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.” Bacon goes on to write elsewhere in the
book that “Some books are to be tasted,
others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…” and
further, that Reading maketh a full man.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
one of the few Americans to cross the ocean to be included in this book, cites
three practical rules for reading: “1.
Never read any book that is not a year old. 2.
Never read any but famed books.
3. Never read any but what you like…”
Isaac Watts in Logic writes, “If the books which you read are your own, mark with a pen or pencil
the most considerable things in them which you desire to remember. Then you may read that book the second time
over with half the trouble, by your eye running over the paragraphs which your
pencil has noted. It is but a very weak
objection against this practice to say, ‘I shall spoil my book’; for I persuade
myself that you did not buy it as a bookseller, to sell it again for gain, but
as a scholar, to improve your mind by it; and if the mind be improved, your
advantage is abundant, though your book yields less money to your executors.”
